On October 14, Randy Barnett, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at Georgetown University Law Center, delivered the Sixth Annual Friedrich A. von Hayek Lecture. The topic of his lecture, the health insurance mandate, was especially timely; earlier that afternoon, Florida Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court denied the Obama administration’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

In his lecture, "Commandeering the People: Popular Sovereignty and the Health Insurance Mandate," Barnett argued that the individual mandate—which would require everybody who can afford to buy insurance to do so, or pay a penalty—is unconstitutional as written by Congress.

“Randy is one of the real masters of the many sources associated with the origins and founding of our constitutional period,” said Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law Richard Epstein in his introduction of Barnett. The NYU Journal of Law & Liberty will publish Barnett’s lecture in an upcoming issue.